Grants and Contributions

Using the NIRSpec instrument on the JWST, this project will be monitoring the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-76b as it completes a full orbit around its host star to paint an accurate picture of the atmosphere's chemical composition. Ultra-hot Jupiters like WASP-76b feature extreme temperature differences between their permanent day and night sides, which makes the interpretation of observations more complicated. To address this, the planet's full 3D temperature structure and cloud cover will be measured. This will provide a detailed understanding of WASP-76b's atmospheric chemistry and its formation history – ultimately shedding light on the question why ultra-hot Jupiters exist at all.

Most of the hydrogen gas in the Universe is ionized, but prior to the formation of galaxies, the Universe was neutral. Once stars started forming, a significant phase change occurred in the universe, a process known as “Reionization”. This project will look for the faintest possible sources of Reionization, tiny dwarf galaxies. The project targets strong-lensing clusters which provide a factor of 3 - 50 boost in the brightness of background sources. This increase in sensitivity allows the detection of extraordinarily low-mass galaxies (the equivalent of large star-clusters) during the reionization epoch and quantify their role in this process.

This project will observe the thermal emission of TOI-849 b, one of the most intriguing sub Neptunes, with JWST. Because of its large mass and its high temperature, TOI-849b is an ultra-dense and ultra-hot sub-Neptune which is thought to be the exposed remnant core of a giant planet, akin to the deep interior of our own Jupiter but without the extended hydrogen atmosphere. These observations will characterize the composition and structure of the planet and reveal key insights into its nature and evolution. This will represent a major step for sub-Neptune and planet formation science by giving a previously unobtainable direct look at a planetary core of a giant planet, enabling abundance and temperature structure measurements.

Observation of the gas kinematics within the sphere of influence of the black hole in NGC 4696, the central dominant galaxy of the Centaurus cluster of galaxies, using JWST’s NIRSpec IFU. Due to its proximity, recent deep high-spatial?resolution HST images of NGC 4696 have, for the first time, revealed an intriguing swirl in the ionized gas that appears to lead directly to the black hole—providing a unique opportunity to understand black hole accretion processes and their relationship with galaxy scale. The objectives of the project include mapping the velocity structure of the swirl, comparing it with state-of-the-art MHD simulations, measuring the black hole's mass, examining Bondi accretion, probing radio jet interactions, and searching for hidden cooling flows.

This project will study a luminous quasar, a galaxy with an accreting supermassive black hole (SMBH) in its center, located far away and observed at a time when the Universe was just 800 million years old. The goal is to investigate how powerful winds and radiation from central SMBH influence the physical condition of the host galaxy. It has been long believed that such accreting SMBHs play a significant role in shaping the evolution of their host galaxies, yet the exact mechanisms remain largely shrouded in mystery. This project will map, for the first time, the physical conditions of the gas around the central SMBH and reveal its impact on the host galaxy. The results from this project will provide valuable insights into the galaxy formation and evolutions in the early Universe.

this program leverages the unique spectroscopic and imaging capabilities of JWST to measure the chemical composition, velocities, and ages of stars across the disk of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) in a level of detail that has, until JWST, only been possible within our own Milky Way galaxy. This novel dataset will provide the first spatial profile of detailed star-by-star stellar chemistry in an external spiral galaxy as well as the most precise constraints on the historical star formation of M31’s inner disk to date.

This project will observe the mid-IR thermal emission of the recently discovered cool exo-Earth LP 791-18d to determine whether an atmosphere is present or not. LP 791- 18d orbits a nearby M6 dwarf and is proposed to be volcanically active due to strong tidal heating of its interior, similar to Jupiter's moon Io. The volcanic activity would result in continuous replenishment of LP 791-18d's atmosphere, which our observations will probe for. The presence of an atmosphere on LP 791-18d would be a first signal that cool rocky planet around M dwarf can host atmospheres, motivating a larger campaign to probe the prevalence and diversity of secondary atmospheres.

Early stages of galaxy formation are thought to involve repeated cycles of merging sub-galactic building blocks, accompanied by tidally induced bursts of star formation. To test this scenario, this project uses JWST’s Integral Field Spectrograph to observationally and in detail examine an archetypical example of such a merging system that we discovered just one billion years after the Big Bang. With these data, the team will examine the conditions in this interacting galaxy pair, including the conditions in the interstellar gas in the system. The analysis of this data will shed new light on the early phases of the formation of galaxies like our own Milky Way.

Isolated brown dwarfs are good examples of what extrasolar planets look like, while also being much easier to study as their observations are not hindered by the glare of a host star. This project will study how the content and properties of brown dwarf clouds depend on the temperature and pressure in their atmospheres, and thereby on their age. The observations will be very important for understanding the clouds and atmospheres of both brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets, and for interpreting future observations with JWST.

This project aims to explore the mysteries of dark matter and galaxy formation using the Bullet Cluster as a cosmic laboratory. By leveraging gravitational lensing, this project will study how dark matter interacts and behaves, providing insights into whether cold dark matter or alternative theories, like self-interacting dark matter, better explain the universe's composition. The project combines data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and high-resolution weak lensing to accurately map the cluster's mass distribution. The second key goal focuses on newly discovered, highly magnified galaxies at high redshifts (z>5) to enhance our understanding of galaxy formation during the universe's early epochs.